Being Ocean as Praxis: Depth Humanisms and Dark Sciences

The sea is history.

Derek Walcott¹

In my dream I was in a huge room with many people in it. Maybe it was a warehouse. Someone was breaking us into groups. I was in a group with other people who had a shared experience with me. We were all people who had been mistaken for an ocean. We were going to take turns describing that experience. I was so focused on how to concisely and poetically describe this situation of being mistaken for an ocean that I don't remember what I said, and I don't remember who was there with me. Was it you?

Sylvia Wynter teaches us that what is commonly called the human is not a merely biological species. The exclusions and systems of scarcity we create in the name of survival are not impulses that come from a "natural" response to our "natural" circumstance. Wynter calls the species we are a part of (or excluded from, as the case may be) Homo narrans, meaning that we tell ourselves a story about being purely biological, governed by science, and then we believe that we are going to scientifically die if we don't keep reproducing that story. So Wynter reminds us of Aimé Césaire's call for something he calls sociogeny, "a new 'science of the Word,'" a poetics of possibility based on the hope that we can tell ourselves (and believe) a story that allows our species to continue to live on this planet before it's too late.²

I am inspired by Wynter's critical hope, her ongoing conversations with Katherine McKittrick's theorizations about science and their shared belief in the experiment of being human as praxis. This is a meditation, a poetic experiment on a new science of the word brought into my consciousness by some years spent writing in conversation with Wynter's words, the writing of blood, the songs of whales, the outcry of coral, and the persistence of bacteria. It documents a species-unraveling encounter with the bottom of the ocean I experienced when I tried to listen to my ancestors. Drawing on Wynter's invocation of Césaire; her interpretations of the idea of menstrual blood and the production of ocher paint in Africa; the work of McKittrick, Michelle M. Wright, and Kriti Sharma on science; and the persistent haunting of Jamaica Kincaid, this is a journey into a black scientia of depth and unnaming. A partial accounting of the story the transatlantic slave trade continues to tell. A reckoning with the story the ocean is telling us about climate change. An attempt to untheorize the global systems that lead to countless deaths and near-deaths at sea for migrants every day and night. A divestment in being human. An experiment in being ocean, as praxis.

At bottom, this essay is an opportunity for me to explain some things that I have been thinking about that I had to push aside so they would not overcrowd my forthcoming book Dub: Finding Ceremony. I think of them as what the seaweed holds, what ends up with Dionne Brand's Blue Clerk, the spirals I had to go through to release what I let go of on those pages.³ What is underneath what happened? At the bottom there is blackness. What do I mean by that?

Wright opens her book Becoming Black with a passage from Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River. The first sentence that Wright quotes is "The blackness is visible and yet it is invisible, for I see that I cannot see it."⁴

The same could be said for my motivations for taking Wynter's invitation to unpack and unlearn our origin stories so personally. This is why I want to dwell on the difference between being (dis) placed, or what I am calling being mistaken for an ocean, and being ocean as praxis.

Being missed. Taken. An ocean away. For the length of an ocean in time. Taken the width of the ocean (if you live). Taken the depth of...